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Lara Prychodko was found dead in the basement garbage room of her Irving Place apartment building on July 12, less than a month after the attractive mother-of-one celebrated her 48th birthday surrounded by family and friends in Paris.

When he heard the news that his eldest daughter had died, Nicholas, who lives in Toronto, rushed to New York. With nowhere to stay in the city, he and a younger daughter who accompanied him on the trip moved temporarily in to Lara’s apartment on the 27th floor of Zeckendorf Towers, down the hall from the garbage chute from where she fell or was thrown to her death.

“I’ve seen it but I am sickened every time I go in there,” Nicholas, 68, told The Post. “There is garbage in the apartment and I just can’t do it. I can’t take it out.”

Lara Prychodko, her father and sonCourtesy of the Prychodko family

So the detritus of grief — take-out food containers from local supermarkets, plastic cutlery, empty water bottles and piles of used Kleenex — spill out of plastic bags that now crowd the hallway. Empty cans of cat food have also mounted from the abused kitten Lara found in an alleyway and christened “Sparkles” at the suggestion of her 12-year-old son. For the last two weeks, Nicholas has been cat-sitting in Lara’s small, two-bedroom apartment that now doubles as the family’s command center for information about Lara’s mysterious death.

NYPD detectives have visited on a few occasions to fill them in on their investigation and to ask questions about Lara’s life, friends and associates, Nicholas told The Post. He also said that he is not at liberty to discuss any of what they said.

Multiple media outlets, including The Post, have reported that Lara Prychodko was last seen alive on surveillance video stumbling from an elevator in her luxury building at 4:20 p.m. on the day she died.

“There is no video because there is no video camera in the hallway,” Nicholas told The Post.

“And there is no way, no way that Lara committed suicide,” he added. “It’s now a matter of ridicule on the Internet that anyone can conceive of throwing themselves down a chute.”

He continued: “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind. My daughter was murdered.”

Given her family’s violent early history, it’s a miracle that Lara had the chance to be born at all. During the Second World War, her grandfather was a Ukrainian engineer who was forced by the Nazis to defuse un-exploded Allied bombs on the streets of Berlin. At the same time her great uncle was dropping bombs on the beleaguered German capital as a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force at the tail end of the war.

But by the 1960s, the Prychodko family were all safely settled in Canada. When Nicholas Prychodko turned 19, he longed to see the world. As he set off with his high school sweetheart — Helene Mathe — on a trip south, they discovered that Helene was pregnant with Lara.

Nicholas, Lara and mother HeleneCourtesy of the Prychodko family

“Our family wasn’t aware that she was pregnant and we were too nervous to tell them because we were so young,” said Nicholas. “Birth control was not so readily available in those days.”

So the couple answered an ad for a ride in a local newspaper and found themselves driving to California with a Syrian army vet who was also a wrestler.

“We did the hippie thing,” Nicholas said. “We went to Mexico, lived in a tent, slept on beaches and cooked over campfires.”

Just before Mathe was ready to give birth, the couple traveled to San Diego, where they ended up living in the city’s ghetto. Prychodko managed to convince an impoverished African-American woman with four kids and two boyfriends to put them up, he said.

Lara Nadia Anike Prychodko was born on June 23, 1970. Four months after her birth, Nicholas and his girlfriend — later his wife — moved back to Canada, settling in Toronto where her two sisters were later born.

“Our first memory of Lara was how caring she was to her grandmother,” said Nicholas, a former senior policy advisor to municipal and provincial governments in Canada. “She was a real sweetheart.”

She was also an accomplished singer and flautist, who was part of the elite Toronto Children’s Choir. She excelled at everything she did despite problems at home, her father said. Nicholas divorced his wife when Lara was eight, he said. Lara and her sisters went on to live with their mother and her new husband. Outgoing and personable, she graduated from high school and became vice president of her sorority while at the University of Toronto.

After graduation, Lara moved in 1990 to New York, where her best friend was working as a model. Lara, who was a striking strawberry blonde with green eyes, soon started getting modeling gigs of her own. Her face often graced the cover of dime-store romance novels, portraying her as an ingenue heroine.

Lara at her weddingCourtesy of the Prychodko family

Lara’s first meeting with the man who would become her husband could have easily been lifted from one of those pulp romance plots. She met David Schlachet, a real estate developer and partner in tony Manhattan restaurants, while she was working as a waitress at The Coffee Shop, the iconic Union Square diner where she had once spotted Madonna eating cereal for dinner. Schlachet was dining with his uncle, who looked up at Lara as she approached their table and told his nephew that he should try to meet a woman like her, Nicholas said.

They were married in August 2003 at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the announcement of their nuptials was featured in the weddings section of the New York Times. The couple regularly spent summers in the Hamptons, where they owned two homes in Southampton, and were featured in party pictures in New York Social Diary.

“They seemed like a really happy couple,” said one long-time friend who knew the pair for a decade. “And Lara was amazing! When I was sick in bed with fever, she was the only one of my friends who came to help, with chicken soup.”

But following the birth of their son in 2006, the relationship started to become strained, Nicholas said.

Later, Lara was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and in 2012 she was convicted for driving while intoxicated. She separated from her husband and lost custody of her son. In the same year, she was also laid off from her job as a conference and event planner at Web MD when the company down-sized, a former colleague told The Post.

Lara and her son TalinCourtesy of the Prychodko family

By February 2014, Lara had filed for divorce from her husband, according to court records. She hired Manhattan firm Cohen Goldstein, but six months later she abruptly changed her mind.

“I need to do whatever necessary to pull the divorce petition,” she wrote in an email to her attorney on Aug. 20, 2014, according to court papers.

By then her legal costs topped $73,000, and the law firm sued her for unpaid bills.

Nicholas said his daughter, who had also undergone surgery that left part of her face paralyzed, pulled the divorce petition because her husband had promised to come to an agreement over custody and finances — a process her father described as “contentious and bitter.” Calls to Schlachet seeking comment were not returned.

Just as the couple tried to iron out their differences, Schlachet’s construction firm Taocon, Inc., filed for bankruptcy in November 2016. The company was also facing two multimillion-dollar law suits stemming from an Upper East Side renovation project that the company failed to complete, court papers say.

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Despite illness and the ongoing divorce negotiations, Lara adored her son, and had found a new romantic partner “who treated her wonderfully,” Nicholas said.

Friends and co-workers contacted by The Post agreed.

“Knowing how much she went through and how serious her health was, if she had thought about suicide she would already have done it way before now,” said a former work colleague who did not want to be identified. “When I saw her just after Christmas last year, Lara was in a really good place.”

For his part, Nicholas is haunted by his eldest daughter’s death.

He replays various scenarios and questions in his mind: How did she get into the chute in the first place? Did someone push her down the chute? Was she conscious just before she died?

It is still not known how Lara ended up in the garbage chute. On the afternoon of July 12, a maintenance worker found her body “crumpled from multiple angles” in the compactor, according to police.

A spokeswoman for the NYPD told The Post “there are no updates at this time” and the investigation is ongoing.

The Medical Examiner’s Office has yet to issue a cause of death, and it may be another four weeks before toxicology tests are completed, Prychodko told The Post.

But last week, the Medical Examiner released Lara’s remains to her father, who was finalizing plans to take his daughter’s body back to Canada. He plans to bury her next to her grandmother in a Ukrainian cemetery on the outskirts of Toronto.